how is the brain able to give us images when we are imagining something?
In: Biology
So when I was in art school our professor told us to draw a picture of this woman’s face. He handed us all a photograph and had us draw, we had two minutes. Some of us did well, most of us (including me) did not. He then instructed us to turn the photo of the woman’s face upside-down and gave us one minute. The results were substantially better.
His reasoning behind the improvements were because we tricked the mind OUT of assuming everything we know about mouths eyes and noses. We have predetermined expectations of what features look like based on what we learned as children… An eye is round… Right? A nose is a triangle and a mouth is a line… We ignore the details until we allow our imagination to fill in the blanks.
When you think of a tree you see a tree until your imagination allows you to take in the specifics of the bark, the leaves… The snow around it shows a root above ground and the stream behind it is flowing as the air is silent.
My understanding based on this is that our imagination influences what we actually see and what we are looking through is nothing more than a camera for our brain to download information. How many times have you found someone attractive then as soon as they open their mouth their features become unattractive? No two people see the same thing and this is because of our imagination.
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